Advanced Voice and Data Solutions

Slow Internet?

“You don’t really know someone till you’ve seen them surf the web with a slow internet connection.” Truer words have never been said, and I’ve got two simple tips to help rescue you from replacing your desktop monitors every other month.

We’ve all experienced that dreadful spinning icon – the hourglass, the arrow, or whatever clever icon your browser-of-choice uses – that informs you that your fricking (or other choice word) Internet is slow again. And some of us have actually witnessed a coworker literally lose it on their monitor while waiting for their application to open, their file to download, or their YouTube video to stop buffering. Destroying monitors is obviously costly for your organization, but a slow network has thousands of dollars in hidden costs associated with it as well.

Your organization’s network is like the blood that runs through your body. It delivers life to all of your outlying limbs – remote offices, remote workers, and remote customers – as well as everything in between! Many of you even have ecommerce set up on your network allowing you to accept forms of payment from your customers. So, if your network is slow or, God forbid, DOWN, you can now imagine how it is literally costing you money.
If you’re like the majority of us, you do not have hundreds of thousands of dollars in your budget to beef up your network and pipe in a ridiculous amount of bandwidth to fix everything. So here’s a two quick tips that you probably can afford and even work on immediately to help you out.

Monitoring: It is very helpful to have some form of monitoring on your network to understand all that is going in and out of your pipes. There are open source monitoring tools out there – do not be afraid to use them! With monitoring set up correctly, you can identify problem applications and users by looking at bandwidth utilization, and proactively address the problem before it disrupts your entire business.

Control the Problem: Once you’ve identified those top talkers, you can set company policies limiting their usage (i.e. YouTube) or network policies limiting their bandwidth or setting their priority. For example, Email is a critical application and should have a high priority and a greater bandwidth allowance than Facebook or YouTube. Identify other business-critical applications as well as cannibalizing applications and set your priorities and policies accordingly.

If you need additional help with understanding or addressing your network problems or needs, Think is always available to assist!

4 Responses to “Slow Internet?”

Was reading your post about slow internet. Cannot tell you how much we deal with this problem. What are the open source monitoring tools that help us to identify the “talkers” that are consuming bandwidth? Also, are you servicing any of the RivergateMOB units? I was with you before you pulled out, and I am not happy with our current provider…

I would recommend a couple of different tools, depending on how deep you want to dig on network and bandwidth monitoring. The first and simplest is a free program that works on your personal computer called NetWorx. Following the directions to turn on Applications tracking, you’ll be able to see what’s chewing up your bandwidth.

If you’re looking for a more robust solution on your network that will track users on your entire network, but requires more configuration, is a tool like PRTG. If you would like help with this or our more robust network monitoring solution, let us know, and we’d be happy to help you set this up on your network!

Thanks for reading our newsletter and sharing your frustrations with a slow internet! Finding the right open source tool can be cumbersome and even overwhelming, but sometimes the best thing is a little trial and error. And even with the right network management tools in place, sometimes you just cannot beat slow service if your ISP doesn’t offer blazing speeds.